Fujitsu
Laboratories is developing a technology that accelerates transaction
processing for Hyperledger Fabric, one of the Hyperledger blockchain
frameworks hosted by The Linux Foundation.

The
blockchain is a technology that creates systems
with excellent resistance to falsification while
preserving high transparency and reliability,
all without centralized management. It is
expected to have applications in a variety of
fields, particularly in finance.

Now, Fujitsu Laboratories
has developed technology to speed up transaction
processing by making the processing of
communications between applications and the
blockchain platform, which had been the source
of bottlenecks, more efficient. In a trial where
this technology was implemented in Hyperledger
Fabric v0.6.1(1),
it increased transaction performance by
approximately 2.7 times compared to the previous
method.

With this technology, it has become possible to
apply blockchain technology to online
transaction systems, which require high
performance.

Development Background

The blockchain creates a shared ledger system
that, without a centralized manager, is highly
transparent and reliable while being extremely
difficult to falsify, by requiring the parties
involved to mutually verify the accuracy of the
transaction data and preserving it in a chain
format.

The open source blockchain
framework Hyperledger Fabric, being developed
through Hyperledger, in which Fujitsu Limited is
a premier member, is the focus of much attention
as a blockchain that is building a robust
commercial transaction platform. Hyperledger
Fabric uses a consortium-type(2)
structure in which the number of participants is
limited, and is being trialed for use in a
variety of fields, particularly finance, but
also for supply-chain management in
manufacturing, data conversion of insurance
policies, real estate contracts, license
management, and energy transactions.

Issues

With blockchain, groups of nodes based on the
number of participants form a network, and work
together through the network to perform a series
of processes from executing transactions to
validating the legitimacy of transactions. For
this reason, the number of transactions that can
be executed per unit of time is limited by
communication bottlenecks through the network,
compared to previous centralized systems, making
it difficult to apply the technology to things
like online transaction systems, which demand
high performance, including the ability to
immediately process large volumes of
transactions.

Figure
1: Transaction processing on the
blockchain

About the Newly Developed Technology

With the blockchain, while consensus is formed
between participating nodes, transactions are
processed by applications reading and writing
data on the shared ledger, with safety ensured
by linking the transaction data in chain format
to be managed.

Using its proprietary analysis technology,
Fujitsu Laboratories learned that, under network
conditions in which a response time of about 64
milliseconds or less is required, such as the
case where a consortium-type blockchain is
operated at multiple locations within Japan,
communications between the applications and the
blockchain platform during transaction
processing are the primary cause of bottlenecks.

Now, based on these analysis results, Fujitsu
Laboratories has developed the following two
technologies to improve transaction performance
speed by reducing the number of communications
between the applications and the blockchain
platform. Features of the newly developed
technologies are as follows:

1. Differential Update State (DUS) Functionality

When processing transactions on the blockchain,
a commonly used method is to retrieve the
specified data, then handle the computational
processing in the application before writing it
back to the blockchain platform. Fujitsu
Laboratories has now developed functionality
that executes only differential computations on
the specified data, in one processing action on
the blockchain platform, and functionality that
reduces the number of computations directly
linked with the number of communications.

2. Compound Request (CR) Functionality

Fujitsu Laboratories developed functionality to
aggregate multiple processes to send to the
blockchain platform for batch execution. This
functionality not only makes processing on the
blockchain platform more efficient by
aggregating multiple processes, it also reduces
the number of communications. The functionality
maintains accuracy by rewinding to the origin
point of the batch execution if a partial error
occurs in the aggregated processes, and
reprocessing.

Effects

Fujitsu
Laboratories implemented this technology in
Hyperledger Fabric v0.6.1 and measured
transaction performance on a blockchain platform
consisting of four servers. Whereas the previous
method could handle 500 transactions per second,
Fujitsu Laboratories achieved 1,350 transactions
per second using this newly developed
technology, an improvement of approximately 2.7
times.

Future Plans

With this newly developed technology, in terms
of performance, the Hyperledger Fabric framework
has become applicable to online transaction
systems that demand high performance in excess
of 1,000 transactions per second, such as those
demanded by financial institutions.

Fujitsu Laboratories will continue development
of technologies to further speed up the
blockchain while adapting them to the latest
version of Hyperledger Fabric, and will carry
out trials with a view to commercial
applications of this technology, with plans to
commercialize it through Fujitsu Limited during
fiscal 2017.